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We’re with the Rebels

France's
"yellow vest" protests against fuel prices weren't
organized by the Left. But the fight to widen their demands is key to
blocking the growth of Marine Le Pen's far right.

by
Aurélie Dianara

Part
4 - Movements and Media

It is
also true that for now the enormous visibility that the media have
given the gilets jaunes has eclipsed other important movements also
taking place in France at the moment. The most striking example is
the events organized on Saturday 24 for the international day against
violence against women. For months, collectives and feminist
associations have been set up to organize a “tide” against sexist
and sexual violence.

One year
on from #MeToo, which had real resonance in France, Nous Toutes
sought to create a unitary and mass movement, in a country where the
feminist movement has been marked by tensions and sharp divisions.
This was, indeed, a success: on Saturday more than fifty thousand
people took to the streets throughout France, including thirty
thousand in Paris. This was much less than Rome (where organizers
claimed two hundred thousand participants) but a big increase on the
two thousand that turned out in France last year. And the numbers who
took to the streets against sexism were in any case much greater than
the eight thousand gilets jaunes that marched on the Champs Elysées
and then dominated headlines in subsequent days.

There
are many other examples of mass struggles that have taken place in
recent weeks in France, without getting the same media coverage as
the gilets jaunes: teachers demonstrated on November 12 to defend
schools from job cuts; from the Dordogne to Rouen, postal workers
took strike action against the dismantling of the public postal
service; on November 20, nurses mobilized for hospital funding.
Although today we are seeing less a convergence of struggles than a
multiplication of different ones, there are signs that this situation
could evolve into a real converging of the peripheral France, the
France of the cities and the banlieues, and the rest of the French
activist left.

We will
see in the next weeks whether peripheral France can unite with the
great urban centers of France, students, and unionized workers. For
now, the government seems determined to hold firm. On Sunday 25, the
transport minister, Elisabeth Borne, reiterated that the government
will not retreat on the “carbon tax.”

On
Tuesday, November 27 Macron made a series of announcements on the
ecological transition, without making concessions to the movement.
This Friday, a delegation of gilets jaunes should meet with the
French prime minister Edouard Philippe. In the meantime, the state
has been breaking up the roadblocks and arresting hundreds of people:
some have already been sentenced to jail time. On Saturday night a
tweet from Macron confirmed his support for the police and declared:
“Shame on those who tried to intimidate elected officials. There
is no place for violence in the Republic.” As usual, mainstream
media have largely served the government’s strategy, focusing
attention on violence to discredit the movement.

But
there is something more subtle and more Machiavellian — and
certainly more dangerous — in Macron’s own strategy. In the
government’s (and the media’s) attempt to paint the gilets jaunes
movement as a reactionary movement directed by the far right, there
is a maneuver to rally support behind his La République en Marche,
and thus prepare the ground for the European elections.

This
maneuver already began some months ago, and is also connected to the
police raids on the offices of La France Insoumise, the main
opposition force on the left. In September, after a spring of
mobilizations, but especially after the “Benalla affair” (the
revelation of videos in which the president’s bodyguard, disguised
as a police officer, beat protesters) Macron crashed into the polls.

The
France Insoumise leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, conversely, reached his
peak support, becoming the main opposition leader. In October, the
government hit further crisis with the resignations of the
environment minister, the Green Nicolas Hulot — who quit denouncing
the lobbyists’ influence on government policy — and of Interior
Minister Gérard Collomb.

This was
the context in which police raids were ordered on fifteen LFI and
connected properties. This was an operation of unprecedented breadth
in French political history, especially if we consider that it was
just part of a preliminary investigation into LFI’s electoral
expenses.

Macron
thus opened his campaign for the European elections of May 2019,
which aims to present his party as the only “progressive” force
standing against the various “nationalisms,” thus pairing the
Rassemblement National and France Insoumise in the same “populist”
basket. In 2017, Macron was elected mainly thanks to the vote against
Le Pen — as had already happened in 2002 when Jacques Chirac won
the election against her facther Jean-Marie Le Pen, with the
important difference that while Chirac had won with 82 percent of the
votes, Macron took 66 percent.

Macron’s
strategy is to recreate the same polarized scenario for the European
elections. For this reason he has presented himself as the
“anti-Salvini” and the “anti-Orban.” Yet Macron’s migration
policy, as enacted with last year’s Asylum and Immigration Law, is
perfectly compatible with that of Salvini or Trump: for example, its
measures permitting the detention of children and the lengthening of
administrative detention.

The
identitarian and xenophobic populism today flourishing throughout
Europe is not a reaction or alternative to neoliberal policies, but
its extension. As recently pointed out by Quinn
Slobodian, exponents of Alternative für Deutschland and the Austrian
far right have close ties with the famous Mont Pellerin Society, the
global intellectual hub of neoliberalism.

The
flat tax promoted by Italy’s Salvini-Di Maio government is another
example of the connivance between the ideas of the (center-left and
center-right) neoliberal bloc and those of the identitarian right.
Their common aim is to allow capital to circulate and to block the
road to human beings. The Europe desired by Salvini and Orban is an
identitarian extension of neoliberal Europe, not its opposite.

On the
horizon for May 2019’s European elections is thus a blue-brown
continent. Le Pen’s party is ahead in current polling for next
year’s vote, ahead of Macron’s party, Les Républicains, and
France Insoumise. Indeed, over recent days the main media have been
whipping up the specter of extremism, as they repeat that Le Pen’s
party, presented as the country’s main opposition force, is working
behind the scenes to set the gilets jaunes along a violent path. But
there are also forces on the Left determined to shape the movement
and prevent Macron or Le Pen exploiting it for their own ends. These
activists, too, will be on the Avenue des Champs Elysées next
Saturday, alongside and with the yellow-vested protestors.

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